in battle a Frenchman can understand, but they are also reckless about to-morrow’s bread and whether the tent is safe against a hurricane in the night.  He is struck too by the fact that they are much more vocal than the French troops, and that they seem to have a passion for bad lugubrious songs.  There he smiles and shrugs his shoulders, and indeed what else can any of us do in the presence of that mystery?  At any rate the legend of the “phlegmatic” Englishman has been scattered to the four winds of heaven by the guns of the western front.  The men are cool in action, it is true; but for the rest they are, by the French standards, quicksilver.

But I will not expand further upon the general impression made by the English in France.  Philippe Millet’s En Liaison avec les Anglais gives in a series of delightful pictures portraits of British types from the French angle.  There can be little doubt that the British quality, genial naive, plucky and generous, has won for itself a real affection in France wherever it has had a chance to display itself....

But when it comes to British methods then the polite Frenchman’s difficulties begin.  Translating hints into statements and guessing at reservations, I would say that the French fall very short of admiration of the way in which our higher officers set about their work, they are disagreeably impressed by a general want of sedulousness and close method in our leading.  They think we economise brains and waste blood.  They are shocked at the way in which obviously incompetent or inefficient men of the old army class are retained in their positions even after serious failures, and they were profoundly moved by the bad staff work and needlessly heavy losses of our opening attacks in July.  They were ready to condone the blunderings and flounderings of the 1915 offensive as the necessary penalties of an “amateur” army, they had had to learn their own lesson in Champagne, but they were surprised to find how much the British had still to learn in July, 1916.  The British officers excuse themselves because, they plead, they are still amateurs.  “That is no reason,” says the Frenchman, “why they should be amateurish.”

No Frenchman said as much as this to me, but their meaning was as plain as daylight.  I tackled one of my guides on this matter; I said that it was the plain duty of the French military people to criticise British military methods sharply if they thought they were wrong.  “It is not easy,” he said.  “Many British officers do not think they have anything to learn.  And English people do not like being told things.  What could we do?  We could hardly send a French officer or so to your headquarters in a tutorial capacity.  You have to do things in your own way.”  When I tried to draw General Castelnau into this dangerous question by suggesting that we might borrow a French general or so, he would say only, “There is only one way to learn war, and that is to make war.”  When it was too late, in the lift, I thought of the answer to that.  There is only one way to make war, and that is by the sacrifice of incapables and the rapid promotion of able men.  If old and tried types fail now, new types must be sought.  But to do that we want a standard of efficiency.  We want a conception of intellectual quality in performance that is still lacking....